When you think of locations that are subject to surveillance, the bus stops outside the DC do not quickly come to mind. Looking around, you will find no cameras or any other obvious forms of surveillance technology. But what about the literal space you are standing in? Have you thought about why it was specifically designed the way it is? Spatiality and surveillance have a relationship that arguably runs back as far as human beings started forming civilizations. However, such sweeping descriptions are beyond the scope of what a single blog post can address. Instead, let us begin with the spatial technology that Michel Foucault identifies as the ideal realization of modern surveillance society: the Panopticon.
Bentham's Panopticon
What is the Panopticon? In 1785, an English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham designed a prison with an architectural design that provided maximum visibility of all ongoing behaviour. The simplicity of its structure is what gives it its power: prisoner cells arranged in a ring around a central guard tower, each cell’s occupant visible from the ring’s interior, while the guards remain invisible (by a few architectural tricks) to the prisoners. This design was conceived of to address the economic and humanitarian concerns of 18th century reformists. More importantly, it both embodies and envisions the goals and methods of modern disciplinary societies. Foucault informs us that the Panopticon provided two major functions: internalization of the surveillant gaze, so that the prisoner always watches themselves, and normalization, for it allows for the observation, documentation and subsequent adjustment of deviant behaviour.
The Panopticon must not simply be understood as a concrete form though – its technology is philosophical as well as substantial, and as a tool of social control, it can be detached and applied to any institution or locality to generate effects of normalizing power. Moreover, while it provides a fundamental model for our current societal application of surveillance, as technologies of observation evolve and proliferate, the Panoptic society becomes infinitely more complex.
The surprising power of the Panopticon arises from its flexibility – it can operate in discrete, seemingly insignificant situations while also interacting with a larger Panoptic institutional structure, one that continuously acts through every small effect of its power to nudge society towards whatever form of normalization it has most completely embraced. As Foucault says, “the panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense” (Discipline and Punish 206). Consider the bus stop again. Its transparent walls are the first indication that it is a space in which surveillance operates – maximum visibility is its goal, while still requiring some kind of containment. This is not a strict containment, but it is containment nonetheless; being picked up or dropped off by the bus requires interacting with the space delineated by the stop. It also runs on a time table as well, thus regulating the levels of bodies in that space – again, this operation is subtle, and certainly not strict, but it does provide a predictor for the locating and observing bodies. Consider this process of surveillance, which we might seek to reclaim as counter-surveillance: by collecting information on your bus habits and your class schedule (both fairly easily attained from simple questioning and/or observation of the average person), I can predict specific times of the day in which you will be contained in a totally visible space, for at least a small window of time. I can wait and I can plan. My movement will not be so restricted as yours. You might not see me, but I will see you, and I will add another piece of data to the pattern I am developing about you. Visibility is a trap. It assures your inclusion in surveillance society, whether you like it or not.
Counter-Surveillance Resources
GRT Schedules
Routes that use the DC bus stops: 7D, 7E, 9, iXpress.
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